Buy This

About

Quince Ensemble releases their second recording on New Focus, "Motherland", featuring socially engaged works by Gilda Lyons, Laura Steenberge, Cara Haxo, and Jennifer Jolley. The contemporary vocal quartet explores a rich range of extended techniques and challenging subject matter as they continue their work in pushing the boundaries of the genre.

“To Quince, "Motherland" means our natal home, worthy of love, critique, and support. It represents the terrain of those who identify as women, as mothers of varying types - creators and producers and life-givers and life-sacrificers. Mother-land is both embodiment and inversion of Emily Dickinson’s “Nature, the gentlest mother” - capable of supporting all life, and of obliterating it with forces as simple as a breath of air. This album features never-before-heard recordings of pieces by Laura Steenberge, Gilda Lyons, Cara Haxo, and Jennifer Jolley. As long as we have breath left in us, we will sing our gratitude, our love, our frustration, and our hopes. There is no greater privilege.” -- from the liner notes by Quince Ensemble

With this bold statement, Quince Ensemble presents its ambitious, socially engaged second album with New Focus, "Motherland". Featuring premiere recordings of works by Gilda Lyons, Laura Steenberge, Cara Haxo, and Jennifer Jolley, Motherland’s range is as wide in terms of subject matter as well as sonic palette. Gilda Lyons wrote Bone Needles after being inspired by the work of women in Nicaragua repairing nets on the beach. The women use long needles made with fish bones -- Lyons investigates the ways in which musical elements similarly weave and mend together, using a vocabulary of abstract vocal sounds. Laura Steenberge’s The Four Winds explores the mystique of the North Star, and its significance in an imagined ancient past before we had other tools to track our way. Cara Haxo’s Three Erasures are based on ingenious poetry by Emily Corwin that “erases” words from Teen Vogue magazine articles, exposing the mass media’s complicated and fraught relationship with the appearance of women’s bodies. When she wrote Prisoner of Conscience Jennifer Jolley could not have imagined the deep added relevance her work would take on in post 2016 election America. Jolley's work is about the arrest and trial of the Russian female punk group Pussy Riot by Putin’s regime for their outspoken criticism of his government. As Pussy Riot has remained engaged and critical of government abuses in Russia and the West and Russian meddling in the U.S. election and connections with the current White House are front page news, Jolley’s subject matter and strong stance supporting the Russian band seems prescient. In our current climate of insecurity and doubt about the political future, it is heartening to see young artists stand up and make work that proclaims their convictions with authority and commitment. Quince Ensemble is such a group, and this album, while years in the making, is extremely timely both in its engagement with women’s issues and civil liberties that are foremost on many minds in 2018.

Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble

Singing with the precision and flexibility of modern chamber musicians, Quince Ensemble is changing the paradigm of contemporary vocal music. Described as "the Anonymous 4 of new music" by Opera News, Quince continually pushes the boundaries of vocal ensemble literature. As dedicated advocates of new music, Quince regularly commissions new works, providing wider exposure for the music of living composers. In 2016, they received a Chamber Music America award to commission a song cycle, The Best Place for This, by composer, LJ White. In 2016, Quince was featured on the KODY Festival Lublin, Poland in collaboration with David Lang and Beth Morrison Projects. They have also appeared on the Outpost Concert Series, the Philip Glass: Music with Friends concert at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Alia Musica, and the SONiC Festival in New York. Comprised of vocalists Liz Pearse (soprano), Kayleigh Butcher (mezzo soprano), Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (soprano), and Carrie Henneman Shaw (soprano), Quince thrives on unique musical challenges and genre-bending contemporary repertoire.

Gilda Lyons

Gilda Lyons, (b. 1975), composer, vocalist, and visual artist, combines elements of renaissance, neo-baroque, spectral, folk, agitprop Music Theater, and extended vocalism to create works of uncompromising emotional honesty and melodic beauty. The premiere of A New Kind of Fallout—Lyons’ mainstage opera inspired by the life and work of Rachel Carson, written with librettist Tammy Ryan, and commissioned by Opera Theater of Pittsburgh—was described as “powerfully effective” (Pittsburgh Stage Magazine), “haunting” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and “spot-on at re-creating the atmosphere of the early '60s” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review). As a composer, current recording projects include the release of Lyons’ work by Quince and entelechron in the upcoming season. Lyons’ vocal collaboration with Laura Ward will be released on Lyric Fest’s all-Hagen CD. Sing for Hope featured Lyons' Hold On on their most recent release, An AIDS Quilt Songbook. Lindsey Goodman's tour de force performance of Lyons' Chrysalis was released on Goodman's debut CD, reach through the sky. As composer and vocalist her works and performances are available on the Clarion, GPR Records, Naxos, New Dynamic Records, and Roven Records labels.

Laura Steenberge

Laura Steenberge is a performer and composer in Los Angeles who researches language, the voice, mythology and acoustics. Influenced by folk music, psycholinguistics, acoustics and medieval Byzantine chant, collectively her work is a study of nonsense and the boundaries of knowledge. A multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and public speaker, Steenberge uses voice, contrabass, viola da gamba, objects, images to create works in traditional and site-specific locations throughout California, including SF MOMA, the Sutro Baths, the Hammer Museum, REDCAT and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She holds BAs in music and linguistics from the University of Southern California, an MFA in composer/performer and integrated media from CalArts, and a DMA in music composition from Stanford University. She teaches experimental sound practices at CalArts.

Cara Haxo

As a child, Cara Haxo (b. 1991) loved listening to her father read stories out loud to her. Today, she loves finding ways to incorporate these stories, poetry, and artwork into her music. Haxo was awarded the 2013 National Federation of Music Clubs Young Composers Award, the 2013 International Alliance for Women in Music Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prize, and second prize in the 2012 Ohio Federation of Music Clubs Student/Collegiate Composers Contest. Her works have been performed by the PRISM Quartet, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, clarinetist James Shields, the Wooster Symphony Orchestra, and the Pacific Rim Gamelan, amongst other ensembles. A native of Massachusetts, Haxo earned her Bachelors of Music in Composition at The College of Wooster, where she studied with Jack Gallagher and Peter Mowrey, and her Masters of Music in Composition at Butler University, where she studied with Michael Schelle and Frank Felice. Before Wooster, Haxo spent six summers studying at The Walden School Young Musicians Program in Dublin, New Hampshire. She has returned to Walden as faculty in recent years, teaching classes in composition, theory, and graphic notation. Haxo also taught private piano, theory, and composition lessons through the Butler Community Arts School from 2013 to 2015. An avid Francophile, Haxo studied film, literature, and archeology at The Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, France, during the summer of 2011. Haxo is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in composition at the University of Oregon, where she studies with Robert Kyr and David Crumb and works as a Graduate Teaching Fellow in Music Theory. After graduation, she hopes to teach at the college level. When she is not composing, Haxo enjoys baking muffins, going on long road trips, and reading Harry Potter in French.

Jennifer Jolley

Composer Jennifer Jolley’s diverse catalog includes choral, orchestral, wind ensemble, chamber, and electronic works. She has been commissioned by ensembles and institutions across the United States, including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, University of Texas at Austin, Bowling Green State University, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, The Canales Project, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and the University of Cincinnati, among others. She is Assistant Professor of Music at Ohio Wesleyan University. In recent years, Jennifer has been increasingly drawn toward subjects that are political and even provocative. Her 2015 collaboration with librettist Kendall A, Prisoner of Conscience, sets to music statements made by the Russian punk-rock band Pussy Riot as they stood trial in Moscow for “hooliganism” and “religious hatred.” Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble has performed the piece widely and will release a recording in Spring 2018. Jennifer’s 2017 piece The Eyes of the World Are Upon You, commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin Wind Ensemble, reflects on the first-ever campus shooting in America, which took place at UT-Austin in 1966. Jennifer’s blog—on which she has catalogued more than 100 rejection letters from competitions, festivals, and prizes—is widely read and admired by professional musicians. She is particularly passionate about this project as a composition teacher, and enjoys removing the taboo around “failure” for her students. In addition to her professorship at Ohio Wesleyan, she is a member of the composition faculty at Interlochen Arts Camp.

We're always honored to see our albums make it onto year-end best of lists, and we'll compile all of them on this page as they come in.
Sequenza21 - Best Instrumental and Recital CDs of 2018: Jacob Greenberg's "Hanging Gardens" with Tony Arnold and Josh Modney's "Engage" both made the list
5 Against 4 - Best Albums of 2018: Christopher Trapani's "Waterlines" made the list at #33
National …

Reviews

The Art Music Lounge

The Quince Ensemble is a female vocal group that calls itself a “contemporary treble vocal ensemble.” Originally a quintet, two of the original members left the group as their performance schedules became more demanding, at which point Carrie Henneman Shaw of Ensemble Dal Niente joined to make up the current quartet. This is their third album.

The opener, Gilda Lyons’ Bone Needles, is a chilling, sharp-edged a cappella piece that sounds a bit like Meredith Monk on acid. Lyons writes that the piece was inspired by watching Nicaraguan women repairing fishing nets with long needles made of bone. The music sticks to relatively simple figures, but moves them around within the vocal quartet to create interesting rhythmic and vocal counter-lines.

Interestingly, however, the second work on this disc, Laura Steenberge’s The Four Winds, is scored more conventionally for the four voices in harmony and uses melodic, largely tonal lines. The text refers to “the imagined past, when the north star was first discovered and the cardinal directions invented.” The quartet, interestingly, sings this with straight tone, yet manages to sound like humans singing and not like a MIDI. They have excellent diction in their middle and low ranges, but above the staff the words are difficult to understand without the text (printed in the booklet). In the second piece of this suite, “Howling like a jackal, moaning like an owl,” Steenberge forsakes lyrics to present another take on Meredith Monk’s groundbreaking vocal style, including long-held notes in the mid-range where the voices cross as well as sing very close chords to create an eerie mood (the owls). Monk-like percussive effects are also heard in the third piece, “North, East, South, West,” which mostly stays on the home tone of G, while in “Pneuma” the quartet combines occasional a cappella singing with harmonica-playing in long-held lines. This has an almost Pauline Oliveros-like quality about it, though it is more tonal and attractive. Kind nutty in a good way! The finale, “Red Giant, White Dwarf,” uses excerpts from a science book which Steenberge has recombined in her own fashion. (In the line, “The solar winds blow away much of its mass,” the quartet pronounces “mass” as “mawse,” which I didn’t much care for.) Just think of them as a sort of celestial Andrews Sisters!

Emily Corwin’s Erasures was created—believe it or not—by erasing some words from a Teen Vogue magazine article, then setting the remaining words to music. The effect is pretty surreal, with the quartet singing, “I, grime, in between small hearts alike – pristine a machine a beautiful thing without a little, like shallow, like clear light through an empty water” etc. Again, the music is primarily tonal yet with modern harmonies mixed in, and I really liked the way the quartet got into the words and music here, evidently enjoying themselves while singing it.

Jennifer Jolley’s Prisoner of Conscience is a deeper and more serious work, concerning the efforts of a group with the rather strange name of Pussy Riot to combat the reign of Vladimir Putin as president of modern Russia. After releasing a “punk prayer” titled “Mother of God Drive Putin Away,” they were sentences to two years in a penal colony. The text was written by someone named Kendall A. Again, the music is largely tonal, the first piece set in G minor and using repeated contrapuntal figures which occasionally overlap and use counterpoint. Each of the eight pieces is separated by spoken lines about the fight for freedom. Where I draw the line is in Jolley’s last line in her description of the piece, comparing President Trump’s fight against the Global Socialists and their attempt to frame him as a Putin ally by disseminating fake news to what Putin has done in his country. Happily, however, this sentiment is not stated in the words of this piece, which is not only a marvelous piece of music but a strong condemnation against a true monster and an enemy of his own people (as is the President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, who would have made a much better analogy). And the quartet’s performance is as good as the music they sing.

The Quince Ensemble is clearly one of the premier contemporary vocal groups of this or any other era. Their voices are not only pure but attractive, and they know how to use them to maximum effect.

The Clyde Fitch Report

With a title like Motherland, you know an album means business. And the latest release from the Quince Ensemble certainly does. Dropped earlier this month on New Focus Recordings, the vocal quartet’s third studio set explores four vibrant contemporary works. It takes critical aim through its anchoring piece, the a capella oratorio Prisoner of Conscience by Jennifer Jolley, with texts by Kendall A. It draws from protest art collective Pussy Riot’s trial and imprisonment for demonstrating against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral in 2012. Square at the intersection of power, people and sexual violence — as well as three women’s courage in the face of it all — the content suits Quince quite well. (Full disclosure: I serve on the company’s board of directors.)

Founded in 2010 and based in Chicago (though members hail from across the country), I support Quince because I find them nearly peerless as an all-woman professional vocal chamber ensemble committed to contemporary music. The concept of Prisoner of Conscience is “totally up our alley aesthetically,” Kayleigh Butcher, a mezzo-soprano and Quince’s executive director, explains. “More than anything, we identify as a feminist group [and] it’s important to us to make the music we perform reflect the world we live in — to tell the stories of other people living during this time.” Quince commissions most of its repertoire, including almost all of Motherland.

Prisoner of Conscience was composed in 2015, three years past the zenith of the publicity moment for Pussy Riot; three members had already been found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and served time in Russian penal colonies. While Jolley, in a program note, admits that she “did not think this piece would be relevant,” global developments make it so: “In an era where there are rumors of Russia meddling with a presidential election and the White House doling Fake News Awards, I know now that protection of free speech is always relevant.”

To honor the chief aim of “Punk Prayer” — how Pussy Riot protested Putin’s growing ties to the church — Jolley’s music appropriates various chants and motets to illustrate resistance and dissent. Other movements, like “Oh bondage, up yours!,” borrow their energy from punk and “rriot girl” anthems. Quince embraces it all with great conviction, heightening the composer’s myriad nuances.

Kendall A’s libretto alternates between the lyrics of Pussy Riot and transcriptions of their trial proceedings, a rhythm that both riles and sobers the listener. In an email, Kendall A told me that she wanted a text of “angry, femme-fronted punk rock.” She notes that 2015 was the “summer/fall of Ferguson and the flashpoint for a larger and still ongoing national protest for Black liberation, and that was definitely informing [my] decisions.”

It turns out that she also drew on something more personal: her own experience with sexual abuse. “The figure of Putin, throughout the piece, became directly representative of my own rapist,” she told me, “but also generally of state-upheld patriarchal oppression.” One section called “Virgin Mary Put Putin Down” was “an expression of this feeling of powerlessness to bring actual change or justice, to lift myself up from my own traumas.”

The trial transcriptions, of course, clearly articulate Pussy Riot’s well-formed agenda. I am particularly stirred by the closing statement of Maria Alyokhina, who inverts the prosecution’s labeling of the group’s work as “so-called art”:

“But for me this trial is a ‘so-called’ trial. And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood and fictitiousness, of sloppily disguised deception, in the verdict of the ‘so-called’ court. Because all you can deprive me of is ‘so-called’ freedom.”

Later, we hear a prosecutor’s question, and the answer of the witness — “Was it art? — It was witchcraft” — is repeated numerous times in a dizzying and Kafkaesque crescendo.

Separately, the music and the text might be compelling, but their juxtaposition delivers a considerable punch. For example, “Putin will teach you how to love (the Motherland),” is, musically speaking, a gorgeous, languid devotional anthem; the text depicts the prolonged gang rape of an unconscious woman. Quince renders the final phrase softly and sweetly:

“…and while she never said it,

Never gave us words from her limp, naked body,

We knew that she must like it.”

The sounds resolve harmonically in a warm major chord that also begins the next movement, “Police and Thieves.” The voices begin bluesy repetitions of “ohhhhhh yeah”s, first sustained, then in an unmistakably suggestive rhythm: “oh” (space); “oh” (space); “oh” (space); “oh” (space), and an equal pattern of “yeah” that follows. It’s completely cool, casual; yet it’s chillingly connected to what came just before. “Police and Thieves,” which describe a desolate police state, develops into enjoyable, but disorienting, gospel.

The sounds resolve harmonically in a warm major chord that also begins the next movement, “Police and Thieves.” The voices begin bluesy repetitions of “ohhhhhh yeah”s, first sustained, then in an unmistakably suggestive rhythm: “oh” (space); “oh” (space); “oh” (space); “oh” (space), and an equal pattern of “yeah” that follows. It’s completely cool, casual; yet it’s chillingly connected to what came just before. “Police and Thieves,” which describe a desolate police state, develops into enjoyable, but disorienting, gospel.

The balance of Motherland is less charged, but leaves much to recommend it. Bone Needles by Gilda Lyons opens the album, immediately drawing the ear with rhythmic dialogue between voices. Arching, looping gestures describe her observation of women mending nets with fish-bone needles on a Nicaraguan beach. I relished the singers’ spare use of vibrato.

Leaping from Central American shores to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, composer Laura Steenberge paints vocal lines in The Four Winds, a mystic and elemental portrait of the ancient past, and makes curiously refined use of a harmonica. Biblical and scientific texts set to rich harmonies describe “what will happen to the sun in a few billion years.” That journey contracts back down to the intimate discomforts of being female in Three Erasures. Cara Haxo sets pointillist poetry stitched from Teen Vogue articles that portray societal messages about body image into vivid aural tableaux.

The interpretative layers of Motherland, evoking the infinite range of the female experience, reward a deep dive. Quince has delivered art of conviction and fearless engagement with pressing social issues, and I implore them not to stop. They probably won’t because, as Jolley notes, “The fight is still on.”

Katelyn Simon, The Clyde Fitch Report, 4.27.2018

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical June 2018

With their third album, Quince Ensemble reinforce their standing as one of the strongest, most forward-looking vocal groups in the U.S., if not the world. Motherlandfeatures new work by four female composers. The centerpiece of the album is Jennifer Jolley’s oratorio Prisoner of Conscience, which draws its text from the songs of the Russian agit-punk group Pussy Riot as well as transcripts of its infamous show trial—the fourth movement is titled “Putin will teach you how to love (the Motherland).” Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Kayleigh Butcher, Liz Pearse, and Carrie Henneman Shaw bring a haunting beauty to the piece, delivering a fitting cognitive dissonance to the radical tone of the words. There’s even a touch of denatured doo-wop in the movement “Police and Thieves,” which draws upon some language from the Junior Murvin tune of the same name, made famous by the Clash. Some of the spoken word sections feel heavy-handed (and a little dull), but the current global politics have reinvigorated the timeliness of the content. The other works swing from the abstract (Gilda Lyons’s “Bone Needles,” where wordless sounds are woven together with stunning rigor) to fantastical (Laura Steenberge’s inventive “The Four Winds,” which uses extended techniques like acoustic beating and gorgeous baroque-like melodies in a work exploring different kinds of winds, Biblical phrases, and hijacked language from a science book). The album also includes the gorgeous “Three Erasures” by Cara Haxo.

New Music Buff

I looked at the rather drab cover. I had never heard of the Quince Ensemble nor any of the composers featured on this disc. I looked again at the cover. Clearly it was labeled with one of those parental advisory warnings which one rarely sees on a classical recording.

My usual practice is to do some research before spinning a given disc but I decided to just put this one in the CD player cold. I had about an hour’s drive ahead and I decided to just let the disc speak for itself. But my spidey sense suggested I might be in for a rather dull listen.

So much for my superhero powers. From the moment the first track played I felt drawn in. What I heard seemed to be a mixture of Peter Kotik (of Many, Many Women in particular), Meredith Monk, a touch of La Mystere de Voix Bulgare, the west coast group Kitka, and a few others. That is to say that this disc grabbed my attention and had echoes of a few other contemporary vocal music styles. What I heard was very compelling, creative, practiced, passionate.

This is mostly an a capella group though they made very effective use of harmonicas as drone material at one point. Even after reaching my destination (achieved before the disc ended) I couldn’t bring myself to shut it off so I stayed parked and listening til I had heard the entire disc. Yes, it was THAT compelling.

Complicating the reviewer’s task further is that the disc contains four compositions by four composers whose first appearance on this writer’s radar was from this very disc. All four are world premiere recordings and all are by women composers.

The Quince Ensemble consists of Liz Pearse (soprano), Kayleigh Butcher (mezzo soprano), Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (soprano), and Carrie Henneman Shaw (soprano). And this is the fourth album dedicated entirely to this ensemble’s work. Two previous albums were appearances and collaborations.

The featured composers are (in order of their appearance on this release): Gilda Lyons (1975- ); Laura Steenberge; Cara Haxo (1991- ); and Jennifer Jolley(1981- ). All appear to be California based and at the beginnings of what will doubtless be some interesting careers. I will leave it to the interested reader to look into the details available at these various web sites but, after listening to the music, most listeners will want to know more.

The pieces range from Lyon’s "Bone Needles” coming in at just over 4 minutes to the next two multiple movement pieces and finally Jolley’s “Prisoner of Conscience” which is an homage to the politically active musical group, “Pussy Riot”. This is the longest and most political piece on the album.

From the initial (and incorrect) assumption that this would be a dull disc to the end of this listening journey I came to see this disc in quite a different light. The cover now seems friendly and appropriately representative of the album.

Rather than go into a bland or potentially inaccurate analysis of these pieces suffice it to say that this is effective and affecting music by a delightfully talented and energetic ensemble. If you like vocal music, political music, music by women, or are just looking for something to lift you from your daily malaise give this one a try. You will be both challenged and entertained. No doubt this group would be fantastic in a live performance but for now we shall have to make do with this wonderful recording.

NewMusicBox 2018 Staff Picks

I know that Quince’s second album made our list last year, but to me their latest (Motherland) is, to recontextualize Mao Tse Tung, a “great leap forward.” The centerpiece of this third Quince disc (featuring four recent compositions by four different women for unaccompanied female vocal quartet) is Jennifer Jolley’s Prisoner of Conscience, a substantive musical response to the 2012 trial and imprisonment of three members of the Putin-defying Russian punk band Pussy Riot. Though it was composed back in 2015, Jolley’s not-fit-for-radio-airplay, eight-movement cantata with spoken-word interludes is the ideal soundtrack and perhaps balm for our current “toxic” (to replay the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year) times.

-Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox, 12.19.18

Related Albums

Search

Menu

About

New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer/engineer/producer Ryan Streber, and composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, formed …Read More …